some indie thoughts on management, leadership, strategy and execution of software development

Who is sabotaging innovation in your company ?

Innovation is the survival mantra of today, chanted by everyone, but acted upon only by a few.Â Companies that routinely invest in innovating for the future are eventually able to putpace their competitors, everything else being equal. However, not everyone is able to kickstart, manage, sustain or nurtureÂ an innovation-led culture. Large monolithic organizations often become victims of their own processes, structures and past strengths. Smaller ones generally innovate to survive and succeed, but are they always truly innovative?

I once worked at a large European medical systems company where we worked on workflow automation software for Radiology departments in hospitals. We had not one but three #1 products in the market! We were #1 in Germany and that product had a great database system. We were #1 in Sweden and that had a great workflow. And we were #1 in the Netherlands and that product had a great GUI. However, we were #Nobody in the global market. While this was ‘achieved’Â due to a very decentralized governance model in that company which allowed localized innovation to meet that market’s highest priority needs, it also created islands within a global company. Local success in those national markets was super sweet, but it impeded success in global markets. At that point, I thought this was a classic large company problem – until I worked for a small company. We were a typical bay area company with several cool products in a very niche market – the only trouble was none of them looked like they were from the same company. At one time, we counted five different GUIs for our products – all different in technology, all different in style, allÂ different in workflow, all different in product roadmaps, and all different in egos (ok, I made this up, but not by that much!). We had a virtualÂ in-house industry – after all, who needs competitors when you have colleagues like that.

So, I witnessed excessive innovation without any direction or coordinationÂ in these two personal experiences, but I was really shocked to learn of more advanced methods, like thwarting orÂ sabotaging innovation in the article Microsoft’s Creative Destruction. Even if just 10% of what the article claims is true (some people might argue that it is sour grapes), it still must be extremely sad and demotivating forÂ any bright, young, enthusiastic engineer to be on one such project, only to see fruits of his labor allowed (rather, forced) to rot.

I am not a psychologist nor a sociologist, so I can’t tell why people behave like this. But as a practitioner, I am definitely interested to understand how to fix it. In our profession, practice is clearly more important than theory :).

Your site contain a many useful information. I look for a lot of this experience.Due to sharing such informational thoughts keeps me attracted to this website.I liked it and appreciate your view and blog.

1 from now…I told several of the dev’s that some of the different dev’s provide remarks on QA defect tickets and that those were helpful to me. When I enquired these different devs why they didn’t do the same thing they said “nobody ever scans those” and “I don’t have time for that” Uh, hi? Didn’t I just articulate I study them? It’s no happenstance that the devs who remark on their resolutions have observably less defects in their code then the bunch that guess there is no time for comments and no one scans them anyway.

Interesting Post!
Just sharing a few related notes from the book- “Inside Steve’s brain”, which i recently quoted in my post When asked by Rob Walker, a New York Times reporter, if he ever consciously thinks about innovation, Jobs responded “No. We consciously think about making great products. We don’t think, ‘Letsâ€™ be innovative! Lets take a class! Here are the five rules of innovation, letâ€™s put them up all over the company!” Jobs said trying to systemize innovation is “Like somebody who’s not cool trying to be cool. It’s painful to watch…Its like watching Michael Dell try to dance. Painful.”
and the second one… Wanton Innovation is wasteful. There must be a direction, something to pull it all together. Some Silicon Valley companies develop new technologies and then go in search of problems for those technologies to solve. Take the Internet bubble of late 1990s. The bubble was defined by this kind of thinking. It was a carnival of worthless innovation- half-baked business ideas pumped into vast money-burning concerns in a misguided attempt to get big quick and beat the competition.
This gives crucial insights into Apple’s philosophy of Innovation. From my personal observations too organizations take Innovation as another “task” given that this is something that is “needed” for survival. And in doing so the very essence of Innovation is lost. As an example, I have seen many organizations reward the employees on getting through with Patents. And with a good monetary reward system in place, the talented engineers are definitely encouraged to get the patents and they get successful too. But i guess, this definition of success turns out to be a bit loose in overall scheme of things, for example when we glance at the data on how many patents filed actually get into the products or even turn to blockbuster product ideas. Though I donâ€™t have a real time data but just common sense analysis of comparing number of patents granted to organization as against number of products it has in its rank, the whole story becomes clear.
An Innovation is fruitful only if it is delights customers directly or indirectly. Otherwise, its just Innovation for the sake of Innovation.